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Second, like a tool-use environment, a reading environment can be composed of three parts.  Sometimes the term "text" covers all three:  instrument, directive and material.  Text can be a tool proper.  In the case of Ricoeur it is a means to access projected worlds and to reveal modes-of-being.  A text can also offer a set of directives although these may more often belong to the discourse that takes up a given text.  A text presents material to be worked upon.  Reading presents a case where the relation between techne and consciousness is potentially recursive.

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In such situations questions proliferate.  Questions raise questions.  In such ways are texts mined for more than one mode of being.  Through such practices, reading becomes a species of translation.

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Elmar Holenstein, drawing on Roman Jakobson's elaboration of information theory's communication model, considers that the code-switching capabilities inherent in metalinguistic function place at the disposal of the interpreter a "whole system of regularly alterable patterns" ("Structure of Understanding" 235).  The implications for the encounter with texts prove triumphal:

If a situation is structured verbally it can also be reflected.  To each linguistic production belongs the possibility of metalinguistic reflection.  Every child learns language by relating new expressions to the ones already known and by contrasting them with each other.  Each linguistic utterance can be paraphrased, i.e. translated into ever new contexts. ("Structure of Understanding" 236)

Sharing Holenstein's unshakable faith in translatability, a sceptical interpreter, like a language learner, will return repeatedly to metalinguistic reflection in the action of comparison.  There appears to be no end to the recursive activity of paraphrase, translation or metalinguistic application.

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Never ending but not beyond control.  The metalinguistic moment can be self-reflexive and self-regulating to the extent that it asks about the parameters of its own applicability.  The moment is curtailed in the reading of texts ­­ if the material presence of an interlocutor is posited as a prerequisite for triggering metalinguistic reflection.

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This is how that quasi-passive acceptance of a world presented by a text becomes Ricoeur's paradigm case for reading and interpretation.  His discourse bars transcoding and hence metadiscursive moments.  The resources of the metalinguistic function are lost to theory and to reading if between oral and graphic realizations of verbal forms too strong a distinction is made.  For example, Ricoeur sets the possibility of operating metalinguisticaly solely in the context of oral contact, reserving hermeneutics for written expression.  He declares "hermeneutics begins where dialogue ends" (Interpretation Theory 32).  Notwithstanding the differences between listening and seeing, in face-to-face communication cultural codes may block any and all metalinguisitic or metadiscursive statements.  Interlocutors may not wish to appear rude.  Interlocutors may fear expressing ignorance.  Interlocutors may not possess the competence to frame meta-statements.  Dialogue, oral or written, can find itself impeded.  Ricoeur recognizes this.  However, for him there is no mechanism in the handling of written texts equivalent to metalinguistic statements in speech events.  He does not to consider such parallels possible.  Rereading remains untheorized.

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Other thinkers relying on eye-ear dichotomies also do not always consider such parallels and inevitably block consideration of the phenomenon of rereading.  They do however assign it a peculiar place outside aesthetic experience.  For example, although he also opts for favouring a single sensory mode, Roman Ingarden in his phenomenology grants a place to rereading.  Unlike Ricoeur, his choice to privilege hearing involves no necessary humiliation of the reading subject.  Like Ricoeur, a teleological dimension centres on an individual reader who is to adopt a proper attitude.  In this model literary works of art are not received via revelation of an inscribed word.  They are fulfilled via concretization.

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In Ingarden's aesthetics, the literary work is a schematic formation which contains places of indeterminacy.  Individual concretizations remove these places of indeterminacy only partly.  Other concretizations always remain possible.  The literary work is composed of four strata:  sound formations, meanings, represented objects and schematized aspects of those objects (n12).  Because the first stratum of the literary work of art is sound formation, the model generates a tendency to consider (though not explicitly) indeterminacy as equivalent to silence.  But this indeterminacy, this silence, is not the space for a hook of questions.  According to Ingarden the aesthetic concretization is disfigured by interrogative approaches such as rereading.

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Ingarden's description and not so veiled prescription is based on a dualist typology of texts.  Ingarden's literary aesthetics introduce a dichotomy between sonorous aesthetic concretization and visual scientific actualization.  His point of departure, the sound formation stratum, correlates with the cognitive attitude and reading practices he deems proper to aesthetic concretization and the realization of aesthetic value.  Richard Shusterman explains why Ingarden overlooks the graphic dimension of verbal artefacts:

I think part of the explanation is in an unsatisfactory and unnecessarily constrained picture of aesthetic appreciation, one that is too much enclosed in a singular temporally progressive and ephemeral experience of concretization where proper recognition is not sufficiently given to the funding effect and superimposition of previous experience of the work. (Shusterman 145)

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The injunction against rereading is clear in Ingarden's text:

Lengthy interruptions in reading, the repetition of certain parts of the work during reading, referring back to parts which have already been read and have sunk into the phenomenal past ­­ all this disfigures the aesthetic concretization of the literary work of art and its aesthetic value. (Cognition 165)

The reading habits that disfigure are those that prolong.  They are also those that test.  They relate more to the cognition of a scientific work.

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Ingarden states that

An essential feature of the scientific work is that it is intended to fix, contain, and transmit to others the results of scientific investigation in some area in order to enable scientific research to be continued and developed by its readers. (Cognition 146)

Whereas

The literary work of art does not serve to further scientific knowledge but to embody in its concretization certain values of a very specific kind, which we usually call "aesthetic" values.  It allows these values to appear so that we may see them and also experience them aesthetically, a process that has a certain value in itself. (Cognition 146)

Unlike Smith's abstract and material modes of cognition, approaches to the scientific work and to the literary work of art are not reducible one to the other.  Smith's modes both contribute to the same end: social reproduction.  Ingarden's discursive objects each serve different purposes and intend different values.

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Others have engaged Ingarden's ontology of values (n13).  Tempering Ingarden's objectivism, such work stresses the relational and decisional grounds of values.  In a parallel manner, the enlargement of aesthetic experience is possible.  Activities proscribed by Ingarden can be admitted.

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For example rereading is a proper aesthetic activity.  Indeterminacy in Ingarden's model is a function of incompleteness.  Undecidability and cruxes also play a role in the appearance and experience of aesthetic values.

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A brief example will illustrate the need to recast Ingardian concretization if unvoiced textual elements enter the aesthetic experience.  A character in Salman Rushdie's novel Shame expresses herself thus:

"Who is to understand the brains of those crazy types?" asked Munnee-in-the-middle, in tones of final dismissal.  "They read books from left to right." (36)

The tense of "read" is not indeterminate.  It is undecidable.  The consequences are significant.  Books with sentences reading left to right need not themselves be read continuously from left to right.  The persistence of past practices is a theme of the novel.  Depending on the tense one selects, one can play with, in this passage, either consonance or contrapuntal tension between the situation of enunciation and the subject of enunciation.  Both choices produce an aesthetic value very much in accord with an Ingardian axiology of harmony.  However it is a value that can only be arrived at through rereading locally, of the sentence, and globally, of the book.

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Rereading prevents the decay of dialectic.

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Rereading brings one closer to the desiderata of a model for embodied knowing.  The model is haptic.  The sheet of skin's touch is recursive.  It senses itself, the world and its own sensing.  Its recursivity like that of language is enhanced by multiple contact and regulated by interplay.  When sight and hearing act like touch, a common sense is possible and transcoding can lead to metacommentary.

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